The article is about Kyutai, a French AI lab with an objective to compete with chatgpt and others with full open source (research papers, models, and training data).
They are aiming to also include the capability to use sound, image, etc… (according to this article (French) https://www.clubic.com/actualite-509350-intelligence-artificielle-xavier-niel-free-et-l-ancien-pdg-de-google-lancent-kyutai-un-concurrent-europeen-a-openai.html)
The post article also talks about some French context.
330m is not much.
It’s more than 0m
Which is more than -$1.00.
Maybe they can buy… three nVidia GPUs and electricity to run them!
In that case, I’ll let them get a discount on the one I’m selling… Now only $100m.
That’s thousands of salaries for a year, that’s not too bad for an unknown company. More than enough to produce something that can attract more funding. Many startups became successful with less funding.
$330m is not nothing. But, with a funding split between a telecom CEO, and a shipping & logistics CEO - person has to wonder what sort of direction & tuning the team might be encouraged to explore. How will they stack up against existing & proven open source non-profits with impressive releases like EleutherAI?
These open source projects are neat, in that they give the average person the opportunity to peek under the hood of an LLM that they’d never be able to run on consumer level hardware. There are some interesting things to find, especially in the dataset snapshots that Eleuther made available.
In general, kind of cool to see France being on the cutting edge of these things. And I think it’s worth saluting any project that moves to decentralize power from states and megacorps, who seal wonderful, powerful things in black boxes.
France is on the cutting edge of AI indeed, the FAIR (Facebook AI lab) has a big office in Paris and its boss is Yann Le Cun. So there are plenty of researchers getting trained on the state of the art.
Makes sense it’d be the French again. They pioneered the internet after all.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This morning at Scaleway’s ai-PULSE conference, French billionaire and Iliad CEO Xavier Niel gave some extra details about his plans for an AI research lab based in Paris.
Six men took the stage this morning to talk about their previous work and what they have in mind for the research lab — Patrick Perez, Edouard Grave, Hervé Jegou, Laurent Mazaré, Neil Zeghidour and Alexandre Defossez.
Kyutai has also put together a team of scientific advisors who are well-known AI researchers — Yejin Choi, Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schölkopf.
“When it comes to the timeline, I don’t think our aim is necessarily to go as fast as Mistral, because our ambition is to provide a scientific purpose, an understanding and a code base to explain the results,” Defossez said at the press conference.
Macron also used this opportunity to define and defend France’s position on Europe’s AI Act, saying that use cases should be regulated, not model makers.
It’s not a question of defining good models, but we need to ensure that the services made available to our citizens are safe for them, for other economic players and for our democracy,” Macron said.
The original article contains 905 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
with translation as well! good bot!
Smart. Even Google knows that they can’t compete with open source models since open source development of AI models is much more optimized and a compliance serving model can’t catch up with it.
So an open source model is their best way to leapfrog these giants.
so they have enough money to train one model
I would be happy to see the real story behind every kind of this tech news. You know we’re the real money will be.
I hope they actually do, unlike "Open"AI
Please put a space between the link and parenthesis so the link doesn’t break
Sry did it. The apps I use seem to be smart enough to stop at html.
nice :)
Ideally, they’d just blow the entire $330M training an LLM, and release the weights. In reality, much of that money will probably go into paying salaries, various smaller research projects, etc.
Ideally, they wouldn’t be paying salaries? What?
Methinks cyd might be a libertarian 😄
